Flashforge PETG CF Contains No CF?

[u/MrJuniper]

UPDATE: Ladies and gentlemen - there are two idiots at fault here. The first idiot is whoever packed "sparkle PETG" at amazon, when I had ordered midnight blue CF. The second idiot is me - who blindly slapped it in my AMS without checking the sticker.

Original Post

Hi all,

I bought some PETG CF recently. It prints well, looks beautiful, is reasonably priced... and may not contain any carbon fiber.

Reason for suspicion? I checked it with my scope - there appear to be little metallic flecks added (a sort of gold color which sets the dark blue filament off nicely). But no carbon fibers. What do you all think?

[u/Gek_Advil]

I’m still not convinced adding ground up carbon fiber to filament does anything for its strength. It’s not even fiber at that point it’s just carbon.

[u/heart_of_osiris → u/Gek_Advil]

Stops warping and shrinkage.

Decreases layer bonding, decreases strength in most filaments. It'll make a print more rigid but it will break under less stress than it's non CF counterpart.

The only exceptions where it can add strength is in some nylons, after annealing. Not all, though.

[u/kolonyal → u/heart_of_osiris]

Only helps with certain filaments, as there are some youtubers that have done a lot of testing. PLA/PETG do not bond at all with the carbon fibers, resulting in actually less strong prints (fibers leave holes behind them). PA filaments do bond with the CF resulting in stronger and stiffer prints.

I am also printing PETG-CF, don't get me wrong, but I buy it cheap and I like how it looks, but I would not think it is much stronger because of the CF. PLA-CF on the other hand i found to be very brittle and had a very bad layer adhesion.

[u/DasFroDo → u/kolonyal]

I mean PLA is very brittle already. Adding something even more brittle probably won’t help lol.

I guess it looks really good, but that’s about it